Tuesday, August 29, 2006

Shooting Mattogno in the foot …

The US Holocaust Memorial museum didn’t seek out Kola to find out if there were graves. They assumed the evidence was there, but wanted to know where, because they had plans to build a memorial, and they didn’t want the construction to disturb the graves.

So even a 3rd – rate rambler like yourself is clearly aware that the purpose of this study was not to provide physical proof of the existence of mass graves and hence the occurrence of mass murder, but to locate the mass graves assumed to be existing in order to avoid their being damaged by a monument to be erected at the Belzec site.

Yet the great guru Mattogno, who obviously read both Kola’s study and Michael Tregenza’s writings about this study, tells his readers nothing about said purpose, but instead tries to make believe that Kola was “supposed to furnish the ‘material proof’ of the alleged extermination at Belzec”, and indulges in unfavorable comparisons between Kola’s investigation and the oh-so-much-more-detailed investigations conducted by the Germans during World War II regarding the NKVD massacres at Katyn and Vinnytsya, as if one and the other had pursued the same objectives.

As explained in Part 1 of my article Carlo Mattogno on Belzec Archaeological Research , this means that Mattogno is either a very sloppy reader of the documents he assesses, or then deliberately misled his readers about the nature and purpose of the archaeological investigation carried out by Kola, to then derisively point out the alleged deficiencies of this investigation, especially the fact that the corpses were not exhumed.

I guess that, if even Mr. Ugly Voice managed to see what Mattogno pretends not to have seen, it is safe to exclude the first option and go for the second one, i.e. assume that Mattogno is simply a liar.

Doubts about Mr. Ugly Voice’s intelligence come up next, when he tells his viewers that «Carlo Mattogno sums up the problems with the study on page 77 of his book» and provides the following quote from that page of Mattognos’ screed:

The only way to dispel any uncertainty would obviously have been to unearth the corpses buried in the graves – why did the Polish authorities not do this? If the main objective of the archeological research was the identification of the mass graves, why were the corpses buried in these graves not exhumed?

This statement would have made some sense under Mattogno’s dishonest assumption that Kola’s study was meant to provide physical proof of the mass killings at Belzec, but considering that – as Mr. Ugly Voice pointed out at the start of this clip – Kola was merely to locate the graves in order to avoid their being damaged by the planned erection of a monument, the “why were the corpses not exhumed?” – question was already answered by Mr. Ugly Voice himself, though he obviously failed to notice it: the corpses were not exhumed because doing so would have damaged the gravesites, which was exactly what the “Polish authorities” and the USHMM wanted to avoid. In Part 1 of my aforementioned article, I wrote about the restrictions that Kola was subject to in his study due to the specification that the graves and human remains contained therein must be disturbed as little as possible, and the row kicked up by a Jewish rabbi on account of Kola’s team having drilled through human remains any more than this rabbi thought was inevitable.

Mr. Ugly Voice goes on to praise «the incredible detail in which the Germans documented the Soviet mass killings they discovered» at Katyn and Vinnytsya, pointing out that these were the only occasions on which «this caliber of documentation happened».

One thing Mr. Ugly Voice doesn’t mention is the propaganda background of these German investigations, which may well have been the reason for the “incredible detail” of documentation that the Germans wanted to present to world public opinion in order to denigrate their enemy and, of course, detract attention from their own much larger crimes.

Mattogno himself mentions the propaganda background of these investigations on page 91 of his Belzec book, where he surmises the following:

If the Soviets had discovered mass graves full of corpses dead of disease or malnutrition, then they would certainly have exploited them for propaganda against the Germans, as the latter did in Katyn and Vinnytsya against the Soviets.

A letter to Rosenberg enclosing reports from Generalkommisar for white Russia, Kube, about the extermination of Jews in the east, June 18 1943[Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression - Washington, U.S Govt. Print. Off., 1946, Vol I, p. 1001]------------------------------------------------------------------ ...The fact that Jews receive special treatment requires no further discussion. However, it appears hardly believable that this is done in the way described in the report of the General Commissioner of 1 June 1943. What is Katyn against that? Imagine only that these occurrences would become known to the other side and exploited by them! Most likely such propaganda would have no effect only because people who hear who hear and read about it simply would not be ready to believe it.

The emphasis in the above quote is mine.

The Soviets, so Mr. Ugly Voice claims, «could never produce any documentation like this».

Was that so, my friend?

I’d say the accuracy of this statement depends on what exactly you are talking about.

If it’s massacres committed by German units in the occupied territories of the Soviet Union (which are what Soviet massacres at Katyn and Vinnitsya can be compared with regarding the evidence left behind and not destroyed by the killers, at least in what concerns a part of the German massacres), the fact is that, as shown for instance in Nick's article Mass Graves in the Polesie and in my article Neither the Soviets nor the Poles have found any mass graves with even only a few thousand bodies ..., the Soviets were able to produce rather dependable documentation, corroborated by sources independent of them, even if they did not necessarily go into a level of detail comparable to that of the German Katyn and Vinnitsya reports. The same goes for Nazi camps on Soviet soil like the Syrets concentration camp, or like the POW camp at Lesnaja/Baranovichi in Belorussia, where 88,407 Soviet prisoners of war perished and regarding which German historian Christian Gerlach, in footnote 424 on page 856 of his book Kalkulierte Morde , mentions a detailed exhumation report.

At the Nazi extermination camps in Poland, on the other hand, the reason why the Soviets “could never produce documentation like this”, i.e. like exhuming the corpses from the graves, doing autopsies and trying to identify the victims, was that the corpses had almost wholly been destroyed by cremation or open-air incineration long before the Soviets got there, and in the case of the AR camps everything had furthermore been done, with plenty of time available, to turn the area into innocuous-looking agricultural or wood land.

So what we have in regard to these camps is another, rather cynical apples-and-oranges comparison of the kind “Revisionists” are fond of.

Nevertheless, as shown by the reports on postwar excavations in the areas of Treblinka and Belzec quoted in my commentary on clip 18 after Mattogno’s corresponding screeds (thanks again, Carlo!), Polish site investigations discovered physical evidence clearly pointing to the occurrence of large-scale mass murder at those places.

To underscore his ignorant and dishonest claim, Mr. Ugly Voice then turns to rambling about Soviet “movies of the camps”, which he tells us were “so over the top that they were not believable”. I have examined the example he provides to sustain this claim and found out that, unsurprisingly, it is as full of shit as everything else we have seen from Mr. Ugly Voice so far. However, as the discussion of this claim, which takes up some space, would detract from the subject matter of clip 19, which is Prof. Kola’s study on the Belzec mass graves, I have transferred this discussion to the blog article The Soviets went over the top in their lies ..., which is published in parallel with the present one.

Back to the comments on the Kola study, Ugly Voice again points out to his readers that Kola’s study was the only study of physical evidence at the AR camps in 50 years.

Viewers are then asked to keep in mind that there are cases where detectives have spent “more time” looking for physical evidence for a single murder. What’s that supposed to mean, Mr. Ugly Voice? If there are cases where detectives have spent “more time” (more than 50 years?) looking for physical evidence regarding a single murder, the probable reason is that, in the absence of witnesses and/or confessions, physical evidence was the only means of identifying the murder and linking him to the deed. In what concerns the mass murder at the AR camps, as pointed out in my article about episode 18, there were more accurate means – namely the assessment of eyewitness and documentary evidence – of establishing the fact and the scale of these crimes as well as the identity of the criminals. Mr. Ugly Voice should also bear in mind that there is hardly a mass crime in human history where physical evidence, if investigated at all, has been investigated with the level of detail applied in some individual murder cases. If the only proof that Ugly Voice is willing to accept regarding mass crimes is that resulting from investigations at least as detailed as those conducted by the Germans regarding the NKVD massacres at Katyn and Vinnitsya, he will also have to assume that these are the only two crimes attributable to the Soviet dictator Stalin, to give but one example illustrating the inanity of this reasoning, and forget about ca. 700,000 victims of Stalin’s 1937/38 purge and ca. 1.6 million victims of penal camps under Stalin’s rule, for there was never anything like an autopsy of even a fraction of the bodies. So Stalin had no more people killed than, say, the military junta that ruled Argentina between 1976 and 1982 (assuming you accept the evidence to the killings attributed to them, which would be rather difficult in most cases, at least by “Revisionist” standards, because they made the bodies disappear). I didn't know Mr. Ugly Voice was a Stalin apologist as well ...

Next “point”: from Kola's statements quoted by Mattogno, Ugly Voice is happy to conclude that graves at Belzec were “only” 5 meters deep instead of the 10 meters reported by witnesses regarding Treblinka, which means that, according to Ugly Voice’s calculations – and as he triumphantly shows by drawing the purported space taken up by the graves “to scale” on a map not drawn to scale, apparently hoping for suckers who will fall for this cheap trick – the pits would have taken up 80 % of the whole camp area. Of course this show requires a ridiculously low density of just three corpses per pit, as pointed out in my article about episodes 11 and 12 of the video. Actually, and as explained in section 4.1 of my article Carlo Mattogno on Belzec Archaeological Research, the ca. 21,000 cubic meters of burial space estimated by Kola can be assumed to have been sufficient, considering the composition of the mass graves' “population” and the conditions under which body disposal was carried out at Belzec, to take in the bodies of the 434,508 deportees to Belzec mentioned in Höfle’s report to Heim of 11 January 1943.

Mr. Ugly Voice also sees a problem with Kola having found bodies, which “doesn’t support the part of the story that they cremated all the bodies”. Yeah, sure. That “part of the story” comes from the SS-men who carried out the incineration, and while these did a thorough job in getting rid of the overwhelming majority of the bodies, there’s nothing contradicting this in the fact that they missed some of the bodies lying at the bottom of the graves, either due to oversight or because it was too cumbersome to bring them to the surface. Regarding this issue see part 3 of my aforementioned article, which also addresses Mattogno’s dishonest and irrelevant fuss about the low number of bodies still lying in the graves that he claims, regurgitated as well by Mr. Ugly Voice. Mattogno at least mentioned the layers of partial human remains in the mass graves (see part 3 and section 4.5 of my aforementioned article), which Ugly Voice forgot to tell his readers about.

There follows a reference to Mattogno’s piss-poor explanation as to why there were bodies in mass graves at Belzec (again failing to mention the partial human remains resulting from cremation, which Mattogno was smart enough to not simply ignore): “there was a typhus epidemic in Poland”, and Mattogno “believes” (a proper term, considering the absence of evidentiary support) that “most of those bodies” were typhus victims. This trash is dealt with in the following statement in part 5 of my aforementioned article:

First of all, why would the SS, for only "several thousands, perhaps even some tens of thousands" of dead bodies, have needed 33 mass graves with a total area of 5,919 square meters and a volume of 21,310 cubic meters, which already according to Mattogno’s own calculations could take in about 170,000 corpses? Why would the SS with considerable effort have created so much grave volume to then use only a fraction of it and therefore waste it? Why would they especially have dug the graves as deep as becomes apparent from Kola’s investigation, down to the ground water level and in places even beyond that? The mass graves from Treblinka I that are the subject of Mattogno’s apples and oranges comparison (see section 4.7 of this commentary) were only about 2 meters deep, little more than the proverbial 6 feet below ground.

Last but not least, Ugly Voice tells his viewers how Mattogno “describes the situation of the Jews sent to Belzec”:

They were in a transit camp, from which they would be moved to other labor camps in the east, but first they had to take a shower and be disinfected.

What he doesn’t tell his viewers is that Mattogno fails to present any evidence supporting this “transit camp” claim let alone tell at what “labor camps in the east” (never mind that a contemporary German document quoted by yourself shows Belzec to have been a place where the unemployable Jews were sent, right, Carlo?) the 434,508 Jews “processed” at Belzec in 1942 are supposed to have ended up, which is surprising insofar as there should be a lot of evidence to such large population movements if they had actually taken place but no surprise at all insofar as Mattogno sucked this nonsense out of his thumbs and our poor man’s Mattogno, Mr. Ugly Voice, is just parroting him.

However, Mr. Ugly Voice may have been conscious of the embarrassment that comes with not being able to provide anything in support of the “transit camp” claim, which is as silly as it is the essence of the “Revisionist” nonsense about Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka. For the next thing you see him doing is change the subject to a lecture about typhus and typhus prevention measures, illustrated with the one pleasant part of this video filth I have come across so far: clips from a sequence of the 1970s Charlie’s Angels series showing the sexy female private detectives being infiltrated into a prison and being given a delousing spray after taking a shower upon arrival.

If only the clip had ended there! Replacing the whole clip and the rest of the video with sequences from Charlie’s Angels would have been even better, of course.

But no, the Ugly Voice is back after this brief interlude to fantasize about how people being “transited” through Belzec and the other AR camps may have thought the delousing spray would kill them and made this into horror stories about people being killed where they were told they would be deloused. Capitalizing on the obviously wrong time frame given by eyewitness Abraham Bomba (whose testimony is discussed in Sergey’s article An Ugly Analysis) for the clearing of the gas chambers after a gassing, Ugly Voice then speculates that the reason for such short time being stated may have been that the victims walked out of the gas chambers alive after being deloused. Reasonable assumptions, like Bomba having simply misremembered the time, not expressed himself very clearly or mixed up the gas chambers with the undressing barracks, are obviously beyond Mr. Ugly Voice's grasp.

Of course it is easy to use the account provided in poor English by a somewhat confused witness like Bomba to indulge in speculations like those of Mr. Ugly Voice, especially when you have a public of ignorant suckers eager to believe what you are telling them, which is what our friend seems to be counting on. A lot easier, at any rate, than to deal with a former SS-man’s description of what one of the Belzec gas chambers looked like after one of those “delousing” operations. What follows is my translation of Karl Alfred Schluch’s description of the killing and body disposal process at Belzec; the original German text is quoted in Kogon/Langbein/Rückerl et al, Nationalsozialistische Massentötungen durch Giftgas, pages 167/168, after StA München I, AZ: 22 Js 64-83/61 (AZ. ZSL: 208 AR-Z 252/59, Bd. VI, Bl. 1179):

The unloading of the cars was carried out by a Jewish work detachment under the direction of a capo. Two or three members of the German camp personnel had a supervising function. One of my tasks was to supervise these activities ... The Jews able to walk had to go to the assembly square after unloading. During the unloading the Jews were told that they were going to be resettled and before had to undergo bathing and disinfecting. The address was made by Wirth, but also by his interpreter, a Jewish capo. Thereupon the Jews were taken to the undressing barracks. In one of these the male Jews had to undress, in the other the female Jews and children. After undressing the Jews, separated into men and women with children, were led through the tube. Who was on supervising duty on the undressing barracks I can no longer tell for sure. As I never did duty there, I can provide no exact data about the undressing process. I only remember that in the undressing barracks some pieces of clothing had to be delivered at one place and other at another, and that there was a third place where valuables had to be delivered. My place at the tube was immediately next to the undressing barracks. Wirth had put me there because in his opinion I had a calming effect on the Jews. I believe that I made the way to the gas chamber easier for the Jews, because my words and gestures had to lead them to the conviction that they were indeed going to be bathed. After the Jews had entered the gas chambers, the doors were locked tight by Hackenholt himself or by the Ukrainians detached to him. Thereupon Hackenholt started running the motor with which the gassing was carried out. After about 5 to 7 minutes – this period I’m only estimating – they looked into the chamber through a peephole to verify if all had died. Only then were the outer doors opened and the gas chambers aired. Who made the control, i.e. who looked through the peephole, I can no longer tell for sure. I think that everyone looked through the peephole at one or the other time. After the gas chamber had been aired, a Jewish work detachment under the direction of a capo came and took the corpses out of the chambers. Also at this place I occasionally was on supervision duty. I can thus describe the occurrences exactly, because I saw and experienced it all myself. The Jews had been stuffed very tightly into the gas chamber. For this reason the corpses were not lying on the floor, but hung entangled in confusion, some leaning forward, the others backward, others inclined to the side, still others kneeling, depending on where there was room. At least a part of the corpses were soiled with excrements and urine, others with spittle. I could see that the lips and also the tips of the noses of some of them had a bluish coloring. Some had their eyes closed, while those of others were rolled. The corpses were taken out of the chambers and immediately examined by a dentist. The dentist removed rings on the fingers and pulled out eventually existing gold teeth. The valuables thus accruing he threw into a carton prepared for this purpose. After this procedure the corpses were thrown into the existing huge pits. The size of a grave I can only indicate approximately. It must have been 30 m long and 20 m wide. The depth is more difficult to estimate because the side walls were inclined and the earth removed had been piled up at the edge. I think, however, that the pit may had been 5 to 6 meters deep. All in all a house would have fit comfortably into this pit.

2 comments:

Mr. Roberto, after reading your post I must say that this debate exposes your biased point of view, besides, you are looking for straws in some other's eye without seeing the beam in yours (the use of the term "propaganda" to define revisionist arguments is an example).

>Mr. Roberto, after reading your >post I must say that this debate >exposes your biased point of view, >besides, you are looking for straws >in some other's eye without seeing >the beam in yours (the use of the >term "propaganda" to define >revisionist arguments is an >example).

Your baseless opinion and hollow rhetoric is duly noted, my friend.

And whether you like it or not, "Revisionism" is propaganda, not revisionism.